Why so much hype?

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I thought Robert Taylor was very good in Waterloo Bridge. Here, however, he just doesn't produce the chemistry the part should have. He isn't really bad, just in this case rather average.On the other hand, the rapturously beautiful Hedy Lamarr is so perfectly cast in this role. She handles the language accents so well. This film provides an example that those who say yes she was beautiful but couldn't act, that that just doesn't hold water. Her acting here is really quite perfect for the part. The inner conflict of somehow knowing her fate yet dreaming that things could be different comes out in her subtle facial expressions. And of course she looks perfect in the nice dresses and hats. I could see why Bill was trying everything to stay with her and take her away from there. Oh how it is when an American man falls in love with a foreign beauty. See "Act of Love" starring Kirk Douglas if you can.The other actors did a fine job in this movie as well. And of course the cinematography won a well-deserved award. How I prefer the black and white movies.This is really an underrated movie with an underrated actress in the lead. I enjoyed it at least as much as her more famous movies. Sure wish Hedy, parts turned down aside, would have played in more top movies.If there is one downer about this movie, it is rather sad. But the wonderful Hedy Lamarr singlehandedly makes up for it.

Robert Taylor whizzes into Saigon with his rich pals and meets wide-eyed, innocent half-caste Hedy Lamarr. The others leave, but Taylor stays behind in his white suit and Panama hat and courts Lamarr, whose mixed racial background makes things difficult for her. For one thing, she can't get a passport. And although Taylor and Lamarr marry and love each other -- well, you can't live on the fruits of love. They run out of money and live in an exotic, run-down hotel so shabby that it resembles the hovel I now live in. Poor Taylor can't find a job either.Lamarr has a trick or two up her sleeve, so to speak. She was formerly a "friend" of Joseph Schildkraut -- the sinister, and most improbably Vietnamese villain your worst nightmare might incarnate. When Taylor gets drunk and passes out, Lamarr "visits" Schildkraut again. He takes her to the opera, Manon Lescaut, this being one of those movies in which the heavy has class.Schildkraut juggles circumstances and the unsuspecting Taylor finds himself offered a job at last. But things darken. Evidence emerges suggesting that Lamarr did a "favor" for Schildkraut, perhaps more generous than simply accompanying him to the opera, and that's how this job offer surfaced.A simple, naive, red-blooded, God-fearing American, true to his principles, Taylor flings Lamarr aside and announces that he's leaving on a ship for America without her. Distraught, Lamarr visits Schildkraut for the last time and shoots him dead. (I can't help imagine the two of them -- Schildkraut and Kiesler -- making jokes in German about their ludicrous Oriental makeup.) Lamarr returns to her squalid hotel and shoots herself somewhere in the body, probably a place that doesn't disfigure her too much. She dies slowly enough for Taylor to return and announce that his earlier renunciation of her was so much rodomontade, that he loves her deeply, and that the two of them are leaving on that ship together. It's only after he tells her this, that he realizes she is dying. "I'll get a doctor!" "No, no. Don't leave me." For the next several minutes, the question hangs in the air: Who will be the first to expire, Lamarr or the viewer? (And this script comes from BEN HECHT, the fedora-wearing, go-to-hell newspaper reporter from Chicago!) I could never get with Robert Taylor (b. Spangler Arlington Borough) either as a man or an actor. He was certainly handsome enough in these early movies, enough so that questions were raised at the time about his having hair on his chest. (His agent produced a photo of a shirtless Taylor to show that he did.) But his features coarsened with age and MGM kept him soldiering on in lower budget pictures for more than a decade. Hedy Lamarr was a stunning beauty, once glamorized by Hollywood's star-making machine. In her first, notorious film, "Ekstase", the teen-aged Hedi Kiesler seemed a little zoftig in her nude scenes, but enormously appealing, even if not yet etherealized.The set dressing is fine though, jaded as we now are with real location shooting, we can never believe that we are actually in French Indo-China. The photography is professional too.

Despite a large budget and the usual MGM gloss, this is not a particularly good movie. Perhaps when it debuted in 1939 people knew nothing of Vietnam--this is the only way I can explain the insane casting of the Viennese Hedy Lamar as a woman who is half Vietnamese! Now if the casting of Austrian-born actress in the lead was the only problem, the movie still could have been interesting. However, the film has many more strikes against it--most notably the very, very limited range of the starlet in this film. Much of the time, she utters her lines as if almost half asleep and had practically no emotion to her performance. Part of this might have been because she was relatively new to America or perhaps she needed better direction. All I know is that she was beautiful to look at but rather vacant.To make things worse, although she is NOT a rich woman in the film, repeatedly she sports gowns that were right out of Vogue magazine--yet she is supposed to live in Vietnam, not Paris. Now the movie seemed to imply she was possibly a prostitute or a mistress--but even then, it seemed silly to have her traipsing around in one glamorous gown after another in a third world nation. One reviewer faulted the problem with the movie to be Robert Taylor's fault--I think it was all Hedy's.The bottom line is that aside from saying the film was set in Vietnam, you'd never guess it by watching the film. It is instead a sanitized and ridiculous Vietnam as seen by Hollywood.As for the plot, it's only okay. In many ways it's a bit reminiscent of Robert Taylor's earlier film, CAMILLE, as both are about fated romances. Most audience members will figure out rather quickly that this romance will not end well! So due to predictability, the plot wasn't able to counteract the lousy casting decisions. While I disliked the film, it seems most other reviews were very positive--so who's to say you may not enjoy it.By the way, just who or what was Joseph Schildkraut supposed to be in the film?! With his silly fake eyelids and lack of any conventional accent, I was left confused. Again, maybe 1930s Hollywood thought it was okay to say pretty much ANYTHING or ANYONE was Vietnamese--after all, who in the audience at the time would have known differently?

Lady of the Tropics is a wonderful love story that of course ends in tragedy. Robert Taylor is a playboy living of the good graces of many socialite girls and their families. He travels in style to the Orient and comes across Manon (Hedy Lamarr) who is a half-caste, being born to a French father and an island woman. She wants to go to Paris so she can live in a white world. Her benefactor is Pierre DeLaroch (Joseph Schildkraut) who wants her to marry him. She turns on him and marries Bill Carey. It is one terrible incident after the other, until finally she goes to Pierre to ask his help to get Bill a job. She must be with him to accomplish this, and then he will send Bill away for work. Bill returns, and finds out what she has done, and vows to kill Pierre. She gets to him first, kills him to save Bill and then shoots herself thinking Bill hates her. Bill finds that she has killed DeLaroch, and looks for her finding that she is dying. He loves her still and she dies in his arms. A very sad love story. The film was ahead of its time, and critics blasted it. However today it is quite well thought of, if only because it shows how prejudice can ruin even true love. Taylor and Lamarr are beautiful, the film is great.